Tim Burton, a tool of oppression?

With a string of hits stretching from Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Edward Scissorhands to Sweeney Todd, Timothy William Burton has been lauded as Hollywood's great 'outsider' for two decades. His fanbase has coalesced around emotional identification with the 'misunderstood genius' characters and themes of social exclusion that permeate his body of work; indeed a common explanation of the popularity of Burton's work might be that it offers hope to those who feel misunderstood that they can overcome their 'intrinsic' social awkwardness.

This however disguises the reality that Burton is a de facto facsimile of the shadowy oppressive forces which frame the transcendental journeys of the privileged individuals around which his films are constructed.

Rather than acting as an emancipatory catalyst that encourages the disaffected to challenge the social norms which sidelined them in the first place, Burton's body of work offers a Dickensian sop to their misery. By celebrating the 'outsider' he legitimises the flaws of a capitalist society that marginalises those who do not serve it's agenda of profit at any cost. Burton's 'outsider heroes' can perversely only exist as part of a system which perpetuates the creation of 'outsiders'. The effect then of these films is to encourage the emergence of an 'outcast' sub-culture whereby people can only indulge their newly discovered sense of heroic uniqueness by going down to Blockbuster and renting the latest patronising dollop of schmaltz served up by Herr Burton.

Luckily for Tim this helps him fund his own continuing transcendental outsider narrative. This began with his misunderstood animator phase when the folks over at Disney told him they didn't like his drawings for The Fox and the Hound. Happily Tim overcame this tragic difference of opinion to wind up as an extremely wealthy film-director living in the home of former British prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith with his girlfriend, Asquith's great-granddaughter, Helena-Bonham Carter.

I somewhat doubt the likelihood of Burton's fans following in his footsteps, however 'empowered' they might feel after a tenth viewing of The Nightmare Before Christmas. After all there are only so many ex-prime minister's residences to go round.